1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to web technology and more specifically to handling of expired web pages.
2. Related Art
Web pages generally refer to electronic data, which when rendered using a web browser reproduces the content of the web pages. In a common scenario, a user accesses web pages using a web browser connected to the Internet, and views the corresponding content. Content of a web page generally refers to text, images, etc, that are displayed on a browser screen when the web page is accessed. The manner in which the content is displayed is often controlled by various other attributes present in the web page, as is also well known in the relevant arts.
A static web page refers to a web page that has content which does not generally change, i.e., which is static. Thus, a static web page normally provides identical content in response to all requests from various users. Typically such static web pages are stored in a secondary storage medium connected to a web server (or on a file system where the web server is residing), and are provided “as is” to a user, i.e., by simple retrieval and transmittal. Some examples of static web pages are web pages created according to HTML (hypertext markup language) format. Often, XML type static content is retrieved and incorporated from another file also, before sending a static web page, as is also well known in the relevant arts.
In contrast, a web page that is provided to a requesting user with at least a portion of the content being customized or dynamically created/formed (on reception of the request for the web page) is termed a dynamic web page. Dynamic creation implies that the data is formed by some computations (contrasted with mere retrieval of pre-existing data, in case of static content). The customization may be performed by execution or operation of a corresponding application. Some examples of dynamic web pages are those in which the content is created dynamically during runtime by ASP (active server pages) and JSP (Java server pages) technologies.
The contents of a static web page may become invalid or have reduced relevance/significance (in other words expire) with the passage of time and/or other circumstances/events. For example, the content in a technical blog (weblog) may become at least partially obsolete or invalid as technology evolves with time. In such scenarios, corresponding action may need to be taken to address the expiry of the content of the static web page (e.g., update the content).
Several aspects of the present invention address handling of such content expiry in static web pages.
In the drawings, like reference numbers generally indicate identical, functionally similar, and/or structurally similar elements. The drawing in which an element first appears is indicated by the leftmost digit(s) in the corresponding reference number.